Emet-Selch *Major Spoilers*

[SamRF]

...

Yeah I really didn't want to read that Star Wars spoiler.

[Morningstar1337]

Yeah I really didn't want to read that Star Wars spoiler.

Comic books would had been the safer example, especially the Death of Superman and Reign of the Supermen. That one saga probably codified the cheapening of death not just in Comics, but fiction as a whole (with Dragon Ball beign a second likely cause)

[Edax]

Yeah I really didn't want to read that Star Wars spoiler.

It's not a spoiler, he's on the movie poster. He also announced his return in a speech in Fortnite. The first line in the opening text crawl of the movie outright says "The dead speak! The galaxy has heard a mysterious broadcast, a threat of REVENGE in the sinister voice of the late EMPEROR PALPATINE."

[SamRF]

It's not a spoiler, he's on the movie poster. He also announced his return in a speech in Fortnite.

I see, nvm then. I'm pretty sensitive to spoilers lol, even avoid looking at movie trailers.

[Jirah]

He was dead set on killing everyone in the first and the source. Your friends your allies everything , all for the rejoining. We couldn’t afford to let someone like him slip out of reach...also he kinda attacked us while we are fighting to keep the light at bay so we didn’t have a choice.

[jazo]

In narrative, some characters are designed to be a breaking point when they die.

Keeping them alive serves no purpose to the protagonist plot, the well written and loved ones like Emet usually keep waves of people wanting more from them as they tease a future with the main party, but they have to go when arcs are compleated so they die or worse, got sided on unimportant roles.

Emet dying gives us a path for increasing the WoL/D purpose and plot points: getting all our soul shards together, so we can use an Ascian godly powers "for good" or to finally defeat zodiark and/or hydaelyn

Got me thinking what other already known characters could be another part of our souls

I think they will force Zenos as another part of our complete soul,and might even already have some other soul attached (so we dont have to go full gather all dragon balls on it) and thats why we was so strong to begin with and is quotes implying we are similar, he might won some personality dominance on the "fusion", and our final battle with him would be to see who bosses after fusion.

That or he is another Acient one not ourselfs as a champion of Zodiark

Still they dragged it a lot to the point of ridicule as to why he is still alive (tho we know Acians are somewhat inmortal, so maybe the more your soul is compleated the more inmortal you become)

Im derailing on my theories, back to Emmet, he must stay dead, but knowing my FFs we might even travel time at some point (maybe after Edengate all time stop mumbo jumbo) and see him again.

[Gemina]

This was a contest of wills where only one can remain. Very much like Hydaelyn and Zodiark. The only conclusion from this encounter was the end of all things as we know it, or oblivion for Emet.

[Avidria]

What alternative did we have? Storytelling wise I'm sure some things could've been tweaked to have him survive longer, but who knows exactly what the story would've looked like then. In character, he didn't leave us with many options. He went into that fight fully expecting one of us to die - he was LOOKING for a fight to the death. One way or another, one of us wasn't walking away. My personal theories are ofc just theories but part of me would even go so far as to say that on some level he wanted to lose - wanted to be proven wrong, in the end.

Narratively I think him entrusting his people's memory to us in his final moments was a pretty darn impactful point in the story, and as much as I'd absolutely love more of him, I'm not sure how they could bring him back or could've had him live and still had the same impact.

Also, I don't like Minfilia at all, but I do like Ryne. At least Ryne does things on screen a lot more often, even if one of them was absolutely mind-bogglingly stupid. Seriously, the Shiva thing made me think everyone in the room including the WoL had Stupid Juice with their breakfast that morning... That plan was amazing levels of bad lmao

[Akiudo]

sorry but emet had to die. I LOVE emet as a character, i would have loved having him around longer, but his very own story, his very own existence simply leaves no room for that.

it was made abundantly clear that emet feels like he can not stop, not after everything he has done, so either we let him complete his plans , or we stop him, and as throwing him in jail would hardly work that leaves the (quite literal) axe

[Packetdancer]

Emet wasnt an idiot and a blowhard. If anything, I think that while he did get mad at you for not living up to his standards, I think that anger is because on some level he probably did want you to and was angry you werent quite there. Him fighting you was to goad you into rising to the occassion and becoming someone with the potential to be an equal and prove that you and everyone else are not just things but actual living things, even if its fully understood that he might and probably will die should that happen. Pair this with the melancholy at the end, and I think that he was at the end just tired of it all and really didnt want to keep it up.

The thing that struck me as interesting is that the Ascians are basically in a role which, looked at from a different angle, could 100% be the normal protagonist role of some JPRG. Imagine that you have a JRPG where there's a world-shattering cataclysm and the world is broken into several different 'shards'. Your hero survives, and now finds themselves traveling from shard to see, seeing pale and distorted reflections of people they know -- things that are just a part of them, not the whole. The story presents it as though none of these shards are real, as though all the people you meet are hollow fragments. So of COURSE the hero's arc is to find a way to combine all the shards and save all the people and bring back the world! It's the sort of storyline no one would even really think twice about in some traditional JRPG. It's not 'destroying these worlds', it's gluing the fragments of a vase back together. Sure, they stop being individual fragments, but their identity is "vase", not "random pottery shard", right? It's just repairing things!

The issue is that those 'pale echoes' and incomplete shards may disagree on whether they're just pale and lifeless echoes... and from that viewpoint -- our viewpoint in FFXIV -- the 'hero' of that hypothetical JRPG is a genocidal monster.

There's no way the WoL and allies can accept or support the Ascians' goal, but it's a goal that's almost alarmingly understandable. Because if it were the Source that were broken into pieces, and the WoL wandering between these pale echoes and seeing twisted, incomplete versions of their Scion family... can we say the WoL wouldn't find themselves in a similar place, trying to figure out how to glue their world back together?

And to some extent this figures into Shadowbringers being a contrast in letting go/moving on, as paralleled by Emet-Selch and Thancred.

Each of them has lost someone very important to them: Thancred has lost Minfilia, Emet-Selch has lost the third of member of that trio of friends (Hades, Hythlodaeus, and the Amaroutine whose name we still don't know). Each of them is now traveling in the company of someone who isn't that person they lost, but is all that's left of them; Thancred is with Ryne/"Minfilia", while Emet-Selch is with the WoL. And each of them sort of struggles to see this new person as their own person, rather than just as a pale and flawed imitation of the one they care about.

Thancred proves able to do it, albeit with effort; he can accept Ryne as Ryne and finally let Minifilia go. You could argue Emet-Selch tries, in his own twisted way; he puts the WoL through 'tests' to try to determine if they're 'as good' as the friend he lost so long ago. But in the end, he cannot move on as Thancred did. Perhaps because of his Tempering, perhaps because he's just too set in his ways after so long... but he can't do it. Maybe that's what breaks him, maybe that's what pushes him over a line. Maybe Emet-Selch wanted to 'suicide by WoL' and finally just rest, or maybe it was his Tempering again driving him to it and he genuinely expected to win. Maybe either outcome was alright with him.

But either way, unlike Thancred, he demonstrably cannot move forward; he remains trapped by the narrative of that hypothetical JRPG, unable to flip his viewpoint and let go.